I've got a question. Has anybody ever (outside of a movie) managed to hack into a system behind a completely locked down firewall. This laptop has every port closed, with the exception of 22. As I see it the only source of attack is to try to hack in through SSH. Assuming all ports are closed, it should be impossible to get in, that's the whole point. So my question is whether anybody, in the history of the firewall, has ever managed to get in through a firewall like that? I don't see how it's possible, where would you start.
Just thought I'd challenge the knee-jerk reaction of "WTF, who would do that!"
The thing is, TTS which is great for visually impaired users has been around for decades, and all these fancy new systems are no better, in fact they're worse.
Listen to something like AT&T Natural Voices which is diphone based, and really no good for VI users as you can't use them at any great speed and understand them well.
Compare that with some hardware synth from the late 80's or 90's, or a software synth like eloquence and hopefully you'll see why the not-so-human-like voices are much better for the people who really need them.
Of course for automated phone systems and GPS navigation, the human-like voices are good, but you need a lot less information from them, try listening to a book, or the contents of your browser window. A lot of commercial screen readers come with Eloquence, and those that don't usually come with something similar, and for a good reason.
While I'm on this point, I wish that somebody would develop a good TTS engine open source, festival is good for what it is, but it's built like the AT&T or Cepstral voices rather then a purely synthetic synth. Ah well.
My bank's (ASB - New Zealand) online service simply wont let me have what I would consider a secure password, The maximum length is 8 characters - which, surely is considered the absolute MINIMUM for a secure password. Couple that with their use of Windows servers, I"m unhappy!
And I'll bet I don't fit into their narrow-minded security definition, in fact, I bet whatever tech they would send out to examine my PC wouldn't have ever used bash and lynx before.
Also, what about people using their online banking service from an internet cafe or somesuch, is that considered safe or not?
You know, that ad ends with something like 'downloading pirated movies is stealing, stealing is against the law'. BUT when will people realise that it's not the same thing at all. When I steal a car, somebody loses a car, when I steal a movie, somebody loses a DVD, but when I 'steal' a movie or a CD, nothing changes, nobody loses anything except *potential* profit. So, without passingd judgement and saying whether or not it is ok to digitally copy IP, I want to make a stand:
COPYING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS NOT STEALING!!!
Why are they using 'normal' laptops????
on
A Geek On Everest
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· Score: 0
Why are they using 'normal' laptops, seems a bit dumb to me. You can get sealed (pressurised) hard drives for high altitude work, or go solid state. And they'll likely have a lot more issues when the temperature really drops, the machines may well just refuse to start. They should be using something easier to boot from different media too, if one of my linux machines fails to boot, I can stick in a USB drive and boot a complete distro from there, or use a live CD, can't do that with windows.
I remember once setting up an old laptop (maybe a pentium III 600mhz) to do some network bridging and a few other things (firewalling, file-serving, etc). The network bridging was between a cable and wireless network, and to get a wireless signal it had to go in the attic space of one building (connecting to the other wirelessly). Anyway, one day in winter I had to do something physical to it, so I climbed up to the attic and opened it up, the TFT screen was almost unusable, slow refresh, very pale etc. I had to take a heater up there and warm the screen up to the point that I could see what it was doing. Now that was in winter in England, it was maybe about -5 deg C at the time, wouldn't have worked on Everest, that's for damned sure!
Have another look at the article, scroll down to the x-ray(ish) picture of the British plug, and look below it:
'Wireless energy transfer has been thought about for centuries.'
Has it, has it really? - This comment really blew my mind, I mean, how long have we even thought about energy running through wires? Then again, this is the BBC so they must be right, the Romans must have hated those damn cables everywhere!
But I agree with some of the other posts, there's nothing new here (decades, not centuries), and it's never going to be very efficient. At a time when everybody is starting to worry about the environment we really shouldn't be throwing power into the air just so we can charge our phones without bothering to plug them in. For god's sake.
I've got a nice little script to do it for me, not that I'm saying that one click in the player wouldn't be nice, BUT people act like it can't be done now!
I was interested reading the article because consumption of anything containing sodium benzoate makes me feel slightly sick and gives me a headache. I don't know if my sensitivity (which is rare, but a google search will find some info eventually) is related to the mitochondrial effect, but it is very fast, almost instantaneous with soft drinks - I begin to feel sick in my throat almost immediately after consumption.
The GPL says that any derivative works must also be GPL, so if version 1 is GPLv2 and version 2 is anything less than a complete rewrite, then surely it also must be GPLv2 (or later).
Am I missing something, or did this guy try to break the license of his own software?
I'm visually impaired, and I went to a school of visually impaired people, so I have experience of technologies to help blind people. Personally, I can see well enough to use a map with a magnifier, but this flashy new tech isn't aimed at me.
People who have been blind from birth almost always (there are some exceptions) find it immensely difficult to use maps or diagrams, even if they're very well made, with different textures and good labels. The problem seems to be that they can only really take in the bit they're feeling at the time, as they feel different bits, their brain doesn't stick them together because they're not used to visually scanning things. The same thing happens when they read Braille, or even raised text, they are only taking in the bit they are feeling at the time, and they must recognise every letter because they can't scan as sighted people can.
Now, people who loose their sight later have learnt to visually scan, and can make better use of maps. They can also visualise spaces more effectively, some are quite astounding - these are the kind of people who lay out a couple of ropes in their garden, map it in their head, and then quite confidently use a chainsaw on the excess growth.
But the problem is, even blind people who can use maps don't need this new tech, cheaper and easier methods already exist. One for example, involves printing a black and white document (which could contain text-labels in the Braille font), on special paper (via an ordinary ink or laser printer). The paper is then gently heated from above, the areas coloured black absorb more heat and the special plastics on the surface of the paper expand raising the image. This system isn't limited to just black and white, usually about five levels are achievable, then of course you can use dotted or dashed lines, and tricks like that to distinguish things. The other main method of map production takes longer, it involves making a 3D map by hand, and then melting a sheet of plastic over the top, the plastic is then removed preserving the impression.
The other problem with maps is that sighted people usually look around them at landmarks (like street names) and then look at the map to find out where they are. Blind people reading street signs, or 'seeing' the cathedral at the end of the street. Sounds difficult.
A new navigational aid for blind people is a talking GPS, and although I haven't actually had any personal experience with it, I've had good reports, and of course it doesn't rely on map reading or visualising in any way. With a talking GPS and a guide dog, a blind person could quite confidently make a trip to a new city. Having said that, many blind people already do, with other tools, and nothing more than a long cane. Blind people are disadvantaged, but if they are prepared to think creatively about the problems they face, they can figure out how to conquer most situations.
What you say is true, to an extent, and pretty much any surviving music is religious, but the 'common people' have always had music too. Played in the village, the pub, the field, and played for themselves. I think this is musics best place, forget buying music, make it with your friends and family.
Longer than 15,000, pretty much since what is often called 'The Cultural Great Leap Forward' about 40,000 years ago. Of course, all the creationists can just ignore this fact and the supporting evidence, they've had plenty of practice anyway.
But really, does this work with a standard PC, is it just a USB human interface device which will work on any machine you plug it into, or is it some funny proprietary thingy?
Later in the article it goes on to talk about criticism by the FSF, Sun and others "The essential premise behind some of this criticism, apart from several technical issues, is that Microsoft has standardised its proprietary format in order to prevent the widespread adoption of the OpenDocument format, which could threaten the dominance of Microsoft's own Office suite."
But surely if OOXML is as open as the wikipedia page (and everything I've heard) makes it sound, then it's just as open as ODF and there really is nothing to choose. Is this just the usual MS bashing, or is it really something that should concern the FOSS and open standards world?
Reading further in the article it is a little concerning that within the formats MS doesn't choose to use standards, such as avoiding SVG and MathML. It's also concerning that MS "incorrectly treats 1900 as a leap year" due to using a non-standard date system for spreadsheets.
Can't remember what they call this feature, the one where you use a USB disk as swap, apart from sounding like a very good way to burn out your USB flash memory, does anybody know if it actually does any good. Thing is, surely Vista will have much faster access to its page file, and therefore using a slow USB connection wont be at all helpful? What is the point in this feature, is it just something designed to sound good to people who don't have a clue? Does anybody know anything about this?
Accessibility is very important. I'm visually impaired and use a device (www.bookcourier.com) to read text files. Of course, most ebooks aren't distributed in ASCII, but in some kind of DRM'd format. I've spend a lot of time coming up with ways to break the DRM on ebooks, just so that I can use them. The only format which I know can be reliably broken is Microsoft's.lit. I'm not stupid enough to hope that google will release books in plain text (although I wish they would), and I'm sure almost no publishers would allow them to, but I hope whatever portable reader they produce has good text to speech.
Having said the above, google might as well release them in plain text, I'm sure the slashdot crowd appreciate the uselessness of DRM. In fact, it's generally easier for me to attain an illegal copy of a book (which I can format shift) than it is for me to buy one and try to break the DRM.
a boat, now I know a lot of people build boats, but this was made of old firewood and a tarp, would seat about 6 or 8 people to go fishing, here it is on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETot3n5jkJY
It cost less than NZ$70 which is under US$50.
My latest build is my new still, complete with reflux, fractional column and a very efficient condenser, that cost less than US$35.
Yes, I specialise in making them cheap!
M$ say that Vista will be their most secure/stable/[Insert adjective here] Windows Operating System ever... Every single time they bring a new one out it's the same claims. I remember installing Windows 95 from floppies on an old 486 with either 8 or 16mb RAM. The propaganda messages which were displayed during the install process (remember, they're bombarding me with propaganda AFTER I've bought (read 'acquired') the OS) assured me that my computer would 'be faster and more reliable'. It wasn't my first time installing Win95 and I knew that this was a load of rubbish, the computer was much slower than it had been with DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11, but that isn't really a surprise. Of course we all know that 95 crashed every few minutes too so that's another count on which they were wrong. With Windows 98 we heard the same thing and again took a performance hit, and again it wasn't exactly stable. Then I was amazed when I read similar messages upon installing XP, FASTER, faster than what, a snail with a bad hip? Of course, in the long run I'd quite like to see M$ stuff Vista up (and stuff the users around too), might get people looking in the FLOSS direction.
While I doubt this can be true, imagine if it were. Imagine taking a DVD movie, storing it on two square inches of image, well rather than print the image, save it as a compressed, lossless PNG. 500dpi is a good res for printed material, so a 1x2" image at 500dpi in 16bit colour should be about 300kb, that's great, I've just got a DVD onto a floppy. If that's not small enough, just make another rainbow representing the PNG image, then make a PNG of that, it should be under 1kb. Do this as many times as you need to, even if my resolution of 500dpi is off, we can just repeat the stages a few more times. It is now possible to fit any data onto any storage medium I for one am very grateful to this guy and his team, as soon as youtube start using this compression technology, they will have abolished the problems of net bandwidth too.... YAY!!!
Maybe not the heat -> electricity, but the cooling? So you apply a current (energy in), and this thing cools down, or at least can be used to cool down, it takes heat energy from its surroundings (energy in). So what am I missing, oh yeah, energy out!
Your question isn't good enough:
on
IT and Divorce?
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· Score: 1
'Do you think your job had something to do with it?' Is not specific enough to get you any meaningful data.
Also, I suspect that a job in IT has nothing really to do with your chances at getting a divorce, at least not directly.
As somebody said above, people who select a career in IT usually have low social skills, this is a well documented issue (and because it's not always true, the stereotype is also an issue).
Of course it's possible that somebody working huge hours could neglect their family, and that could set them on the road to divorce, so maybe you should look for a correlation between hours worked and divorce rate. Also of course, people with IT jobs, for which they can easily work long hours, and often do so from home, may have a tendency to absorb themselves in their work to hide from the fact that their relationship is crashing down around them. Some people console and absorb themselves in alcohol, some with their PC.
I used to have a Creative Nomad Jukebox, although it was called a DAP (Digital Audio Player) outside the US. One of their original hard drive MP3 players. It had the play modes you'd expect, including random and shuffle. Random and shuffle did exactly the same thing, which was to play some songs all the time, and I mean all the time, some tracks from time to time, and some tracks never. In recent years I put it in the car, and occasionally in a 20-30 minute journey I would hear the same song two or three times, I had about 1000 tracks on it.
It seemed to get worse as it got older, I even wiped it, took out the hard drive and trashed the partition table on a pc, then rebuilt it and started again, but it didn't change a thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a question. Has anybody ever (outside of a movie) managed to hack into a system behind a completely locked down firewall. This laptop has every port closed, with the exception of 22. As I see it the only source of attack is to try to hack in through SSH. Assuming all ports are closed, it should be impossible to get in, that's the whole point. So my question is whether anybody, in the history of the firewall, has ever managed to get in through a firewall like that? I don't see how it's possible, where would you start.
Just thought I'd challenge the knee-jerk reaction of "WTF, who would do that!"
Of course, there are vids... :-)
http://space.jaxa.jp/movie/20071113_kaguya_movie01_e.html
Apparently they're restricting access to between business hours (9am - 4pm Monday - Friday, NZ time). I can't for the life of me see why!
The thing is, TTS which is great for visually impaired users has been around for decades, and all these fancy new systems are no better, in fact they're worse.
Listen to something like AT&T Natural Voices which is diphone based, and really no good for VI users as you can't use them at any great speed and understand them well.
Compare that with some hardware synth from the late 80's or 90's, or a software synth like eloquence and hopefully you'll see why the not-so-human-like voices are much better for the people who really need them.
Of course for automated phone systems and GPS navigation, the human-like voices are good, but you need a lot less information from them, try listening to a book, or the contents of your browser window. A lot of commercial screen readers come with Eloquence, and those that don't usually come with something similar, and for a good reason.
While I'm on this point, I wish that somebody would develop a good TTS engine open source, festival is good for what it is, but it's built like the AT&T or Cepstral voices rather then a purely synthetic synth. Ah well.
My bank's (ASB - New Zealand) online service simply wont let me have what I would consider a secure password, The maximum length is 8 characters - which, surely is considered the absolute MINIMUM for a secure password. Couple that with their use of Windows servers, I"m unhappy!
And I'll bet I don't fit into their narrow-minded security definition, in fact, I bet whatever tech they would send out to examine my PC wouldn't have ever used bash and lynx before.
Also, what about people using their online banking service from an internet cafe or somesuch, is that considered safe or not?
You know, that ad ends with something like 'downloading pirated movies is stealing, stealing is against the law'. BUT when will people realise that it's not the same thing at all. When I steal a car, somebody loses a car, when I steal a movie, somebody loses a DVD, but when I 'steal' a movie or a CD, nothing changes, nobody loses anything except *potential* profit. So, without passingd judgement and saying whether or not it is ok to digitally copy IP, I want to make a stand:
COPYING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS NOT STEALING!!!
Why are they using 'normal' laptops, seems a bit dumb to me. You can get sealed (pressurised) hard drives for high altitude work, or go solid state. And they'll likely have a lot more issues when the temperature really drops, the machines may well just refuse to start. They should be using something easier to boot from different media too, if one of my linux machines fails to boot, I can stick in a USB drive and boot a complete distro from there, or use a live CD, can't do that with windows.
I remember once setting up an old laptop (maybe a pentium III 600mhz) to do some network bridging and a few other things (firewalling, file-serving, etc). The network bridging was between a cable and wireless network, and to get a wireless signal it had to go in the attic space of one building (connecting to the other wirelessly). Anyway, one day in winter I had to do something physical to it, so I climbed up to the attic and opened it up, the TFT screen was almost unusable, slow refresh, very pale etc. I had to take a heater up there and warm the screen up to the point that I could see what it was doing. Now that was in winter in England, it was maybe about -5 deg C at the time, wouldn't have worked on Everest, that's for damned sure!
Have another look at the article, scroll down to the x-ray(ish) picture of the British plug, and look below it: 'Wireless energy transfer has been thought about for centuries.' Has it, has it really? - This comment really blew my mind, I mean, how long have we even thought about energy running through wires? Then again, this is the BBC so they must be right, the Romans must have hated those damn cables everywhere! But I agree with some of the other posts, there's nothing new here (decades, not centuries), and it's never going to be very efficient. At a time when everybody is starting to worry about the environment we really shouldn't be throwing power into the air just so we can charge our phones without bothering to plug them in. For god's sake.
How hard is it to type:
mplayer -dumpstream $STREAM -dumpfile $OUTFILE
I've got a nice little script to do it for me, not that I'm saying that one click in the player wouldn't be nice, BUT people act like it can't be done now!
I was interested reading the article because consumption of anything containing sodium benzoate makes me feel slightly sick and gives me a headache. I don't know if my sensitivity (which is rare, but a google search will find some info eventually) is related to the mitochondrial effect, but it is very fast, almost instantaneous with soft drinks - I begin to feel sick in my throat almost immediately after consumption.
The GPL says that any derivative works must also be GPL, so if version 1 is GPLv2 and version 2 is anything less than a complete rewrite, then surely it also must be GPLv2 (or later).
Am I missing something, or did this guy try to break the license of his own software?
I'm visually impaired, and I went to a school of visually impaired people, so I have experience of technologies to help blind people. Personally, I can see well enough to use a map with a magnifier, but this flashy new tech isn't aimed at me.
People who have been blind from birth almost always (there are some exceptions) find it immensely difficult to use maps or diagrams, even if they're very well made, with different textures and good labels. The problem seems to be that they can only really take in the bit they're feeling at the time, as they feel different bits, their brain doesn't stick them together because they're not used to visually scanning things. The same thing happens when they read Braille, or even raised text, they are only taking in the bit they are feeling at the time, and they must recognise every letter because they can't scan as sighted people can.
Now, people who loose their sight later have learnt to visually scan, and can make better use of maps. They can also visualise spaces more effectively, some are quite astounding - these are the kind of people who lay out a couple of ropes in their garden, map it in their head, and then quite confidently use a chainsaw on the excess growth.
But the problem is, even blind people who can use maps don't need this new tech, cheaper and easier methods already exist. One for example, involves printing a black and white document (which could contain text-labels in the Braille font), on special paper (via an ordinary ink or laser printer). The paper is then gently heated from above, the areas coloured black absorb more heat and the special plastics on the surface of the paper expand raising the image. This system isn't limited to just black and white, usually about five levels are achievable, then of course you can use dotted or dashed lines, and tricks like that to distinguish things.
The other main method of map production takes longer, it involves making a 3D map by hand, and then melting a sheet of plastic over the top, the plastic is then removed preserving the impression.
The other problem with maps is that sighted people usually look around them at landmarks (like street names) and then look at the map to find out where they are. Blind people reading street signs, or 'seeing' the cathedral at the end of the street. Sounds difficult.
A new navigational aid for blind people is a talking GPS, and although I haven't actually had any personal experience with it, I've had good reports, and of course it doesn't rely on map reading or visualising in any way. With a talking GPS and a guide dog, a blind person could quite confidently make a trip to a new city. Having said that, many blind people already do, with other tools, and nothing more than a long cane. Blind people are disadvantaged, but if they are prepared to think creatively about the problems they face, they can figure out how to conquer most situations.
Actually, it's like walking down the street with one eye closed, and it's not that hard to do.
What you say is true, to an extent, and pretty much any surviving music is religious, but the 'common people' have always had music too. Played in the village, the pub, the field, and played for themselves. I think this is musics best place, forget buying music, make it with your friends and family.
Longer than 15,000, pretty much since what is often called 'The Cultural Great Leap Forward' about 40,000 years ago. Of course, all the creationists can just ignore this fact and the supporting evidence, they've had plenty of practice anyway.
but does it work on Linux?
But really, does this work with a standard PC, is it just a USB human interface device which will work on any machine you plug it into, or is it some funny proprietary thingy?
This is it, people keep going on about ODF v OOXML, and although I don't care for MS and their attempts at keeping the support of governments and the like in these interesting times, OOXML "meets the European Union definitions of an Open Standard, meaning the specification is freely available and implementable."
Later in the article it goes on to talk about criticism by the FSF, Sun and others "The essential premise behind some of this criticism, apart from several technical issues, is that Microsoft has standardised its proprietary format in order to prevent the widespread adoption of the OpenDocument format, which could threaten the dominance of Microsoft's own Office suite."
But surely if OOXML is as open as the wikipedia page (and everything I've heard) makes it sound, then it's just as open as ODF and there really is nothing to choose. Is this just the usual MS bashing, or is it really something that should concern the FOSS and open standards world?
Reading further in the article it is a little concerning that within the formats MS doesn't choose to use standards, such as avoiding SVG and MathML. It's also concerning that MS "incorrectly treats 1900 as a leap year" due to using a non-standard date system for spreadsheets.
Can't remember what they call this feature, the one where you use a USB disk as swap, apart from sounding like a very good way to burn out your USB flash memory, does anybody know if it actually does any good. Thing is, surely Vista will have much faster access to its page file, and therefore using a slow USB connection wont be at all helpful? What is the point in this feature, is it just something designed to sound good to people who don't have a clue? Does anybody know anything about this?
Accessibility is very important. I'm visually impaired and use a device (www.bookcourier.com) to read text files. Of course, most ebooks aren't distributed in ASCII, but in some kind of DRM'd format. I've spend a lot of time coming up with ways to break the DRM on ebooks, just so that I can use them. The only format which I know can be reliably broken is Microsoft's .lit. I'm not stupid enough to hope that google will release books in plain text (although I wish they would), and I'm sure almost no publishers would allow them to, but I hope whatever portable reader they produce has good text to speech.
Having said the above, google might as well release them in plain text, I'm sure the slashdot crowd appreciate the uselessness of DRM. In fact, it's generally easier for me to attain an illegal copy of a book (which I can format shift) than it is for me to buy one and try to break the DRM.
This world is really screwed up!
a boat, now I know a lot of people build boats, but this was made of old firewood and a tarp, would seat about 6 or 8 people to go fishing, here it is on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETot3n5jkJY
It cost less than NZ$70 which is under US$50.
My latest build is my new still, complete with reflux, fractional column and a very efficient condenser, that cost less than US$35.
Yes, I specialise in making them cheap!
M$ say that Vista will be their most secure/stable/[Insert adjective here] Windows Operating System ever... Every single time they bring a new one out it's the same claims. I remember installing Windows 95 from floppies on an old 486 with either 8 or 16mb RAM. The propaganda messages which were displayed during the install process (remember, they're bombarding me with propaganda AFTER I've bought (read 'acquired') the OS) assured me that my computer would 'be faster and more reliable'. It wasn't my first time installing Win95 and I knew that this was a load of rubbish, the computer was much slower than it had been with DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11, but that isn't really a surprise. Of course we all know that 95 crashed every few minutes too so that's another count on which they were wrong. With Windows 98 we heard the same thing and again took a performance hit, and again it wasn't exactly stable. Then I was amazed when I read similar messages upon installing XP, FASTER, faster than what, a snail with a bad hip? Of course, in the long run I'd quite like to see M$ stuff Vista up (and stuff the users around too), might get people looking in the FLOSS direction.
While I doubt this can be true, imagine if it were. Imagine taking a DVD movie, storing it on two square inches of image, well rather than print the image, save it as a compressed, lossless PNG. 500dpi is a good res for printed material, so a 1x2" image at 500dpi in 16bit colour should be about 300kb, that's great, I've just got a DVD onto a floppy. If that's not small enough, just make another rainbow representing the PNG image, then make a PNG of that, it should be under 1kb. Do this as many times as you need to, even if my resolution of 500dpi is off, we can just repeat the stages a few more times. It is now possible to fit any data onto any storage medium I for one am very grateful to this guy and his team, as soon as youtube start using this compression technology, they will have abolished the problems of net bandwidth too.... YAY!!!
Maybe not the heat -> electricity, but the cooling? So you apply a current (energy in), and this thing cools down, or at least can be used to cool down, it takes heat energy from its surroundings (energy in). So what am I missing, oh yeah, energy out!
Also, I suspect that a job in IT has nothing really to do with your chances at getting a divorce, at least not directly.
As somebody said above, people who select a career in IT usually have low social skills, this is a well documented issue (and because it's not always true, the stereotype is also an issue).
Of course it's possible that somebody working huge hours could neglect their family, and that could set them on the road to divorce, so maybe you should look for a correlation between hours worked and divorce rate. Also of course, people with IT jobs, for which they can easily work long hours, and often do so from home, may have a tendency to absorb themselves in their work to hide from the fact that their relationship is crashing down around them. Some people console and absorb themselves in alcohol, some with their PC.
It seemed to get worse as it got older, I even wiped it, took out the hard drive and trashed the partition table on a pc, then rebuilt it and started again, but it didn't change a thing.
Thank god it's now in lots of little bits!